g technological regime, and can propel industry evolution onto a new plane of development without any major disturbance to its existing structure. According to Malerba and Orsenigo (1997), the competency-enhancing pattern of innovation is more likely to be found in the newer sectors of the economy like chemicals and electronics. The history of Raychem, one of the most consistently innovative companies in the chemical sector supports this view. As Paul Cook, the company's founder and long-time chief executive explained to William Taylor of the Harvard Business Review some years ago (Taylor 1990, pp.98-9): Too many people still think innovation is about one brilliant technologist coming up with one breakthrough idea. It's not. When we started Raychem, we began to learn what radiation chemistry could do. Within three or four years, we had generated virtually every idea behind the products that we are selling today (over thirty years on), and we are still working on that original inventory of ideas.Likewise, the leading companies in the semiconductor sector, like Intel, continue to see the technological trajectory over the next decade and beyond as very predictable, and the search for ever wider applications as the primary imperative in sustaining industry growth (Kirkpatrick 1997). Such findings and examples lend credence to belief of commentators like Reich (1987) that the collective capacity of organisations to push a basic technology in new directions, continuously refining it into a stream of new products, which can in turn spawn further competency-enhancing technological trajectories, is becoming more and more the primary engine of wealth creation in the modern economy. The emphasis on systems and processes associated with the interest in creative imitation, absorptive capacity and cumulative change has highlighted the need to see innovation in much wider terms than that involving physical technology alone. As the recent study by Mark...
